A $700 million lure for finance biz whistleblowers

—and hundreds are grabbing for it…

Anyone brooding about illegal practices in the financial markets now has a $700 million incentive from the federal government to speak up.

And Chicagoans are responding to the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission call for whistleblowers, say lawyers who work with them. So are firms anxious about the tattling programs created in 2010 by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. Some 350 Illinois tipsters dialed up the SEC in the past five years, and tips to the CFTC jumped 18 percent this year after a $10 million payout in April.

“We saw a massive influx of inquiries from people who knew about fraud and were in a position, and felt comfortable finally, to report what they knew,” says Erika Kelton, a Washington, D.C., attorney at Phillips & Cohen who won a $32 million-plus award for a whistleblower in the biggest SEC payday so far.